


raindrops on roses

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M, lance teaches keith guitar, they're back on earth and trying to adjust to life again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 15:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9447677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: “C’mon, I don’t want to sing alone,” he insists. “And I like hearing your voice.”“I’m not good.”“It’s not about beinggood. It’s about…beingwithme.”--He wonders if the rest of the paladins think that way. If they struggle with everyday tasks, if they feel the call of adrenaline again sometimes, if they wake up some mornings antsy and trying to itch a scratch that they can’t touch any more.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is based off of a prompt i received on tumblr that was "guitar, lights, rainy day, 'whenever I see __ I think of you'" and instructions to interpret as i wanted, so i did lmao
> 
> have post-canon klance struggling to go back to every day life on earth bc ive been thinking abt them trying to assimilate to normal life again recently
> 
> **warning** for some ptsd-ish symptoms (they both go thru some UnSpecific Trauma related to a Water Incident, i dont go into depth abt it in the fic but. they both almost drowned is all u need to know). there r no anxiety attacks or anything super explicit but it talks abt it a little bit so heads up if that makes u uncomfortable

“How long has it been?”

Keith doesn’t turn around to look at Lance where Keith knows he’s standing in the doorway between the balcony and their bedroom. The sky is in between day and night, the limbo before sunrise, and Keith can see the moon as the black slow fades into pastel blue.

A hand touches his back right between his shoulder blades, and Keith doesn’t flinch. He feels Lance standing next to him, watching the sky too.

Keith doesn’t ask _how long since what_? He crosses his arms over the balcony railing, leaning.

“It’ll be six months on Thursday,” he says. “It’s exactly a hundred and eighty days today.”

Lance hums in acknowledgment and doesn’t say anything to that. The hand on Keith’s back slides up to sit at the nape of his neck before falling away completely, and then he feels Lance leaning against the balcony railing too.

“Do you ever miss it?”

The sun peaks over the shoreline, and light bounces off the ocean’s glassy surface. “I don’t know. I guess…sometimes.”

“I miss it,” Lance admits quietly. “Don’t get me wrong, I love being back home, and I especially love being back home with you. I don’t know that I could’ve gone much longer without seeing my family, without knowing they were okay…I would’ve gone crazy on that ship if we’d stayed for another year.”

Keith smiles, although it’s not a happy one. “I noticed.”

Lance laughs, nudging him playfully and mumbling for him to stop being mean. The moment doesn’t last long, though, and when Keith glances at him, his smile has dropped from his face.

“But sometimes…I mean, even though I love being home, sometimes I want to be back _there_. You know, saving everyone. Meeting people and fighting. The adrenaline. The rush of it all and feeling connected with everyone when we formed Voltron, like—like—“

“Like we’re part of something bigger?”

Lance nods. “Yeah. Yeah, and we _were_. We _were_ part of something bigger than just us. We were…”

He stops. Slows his breathing. He bows his head and Keith watches him from the corner of his eye, wanting to reach out and smooth the worried, tired lines away from Lance’s brows. So many things happened out there, so many uncontrollable things. Proof of that is still here, even if minutely—in the scars on Lance’s side, the worry lines on his face, the look in his eyes. Everyone was changed by Voltron, by the war. It’s just harder to see it on Lance, sometimes, maybe because Keith still remembers that stupid teenager from the Garrison.

“I get it,” Keith says. He uncrosses his arms and sets a hand gently on Lance’s forearm, trying to comfort him. “I miss it sometimes too.”

“But it’s not—it’s not like _missing_ ,” Lance stresses. “That’s not exactly what I mean. It’s like…it’s like we spent so long out there, doing stupid, dangerous, horrifying stuff that now I can’t—I can’t _not do_ stupid, dangerous, horrifying stuff! Everything I do—Keith—“

There’s a pause where Keith doesn’t breathe, waiting for Lance to gather himself. He slides his hand down Lance’s forearm until he finds that familiar hand. He traces Lance’s knuckles with his fingertips while he waits.

“I don’t know how to _live here_ anymore. Earth’s my home—our home—but it doesn’t…feel the same.”

“I know,” Keith says, because he does. “It’s…it’s hard.”

Lance nods once, firmly. He seems to feel Keith’s hand on his for the first time and shifts so their fingers are entwined. Once they are, he gives Keith’s hand a tight squeeze before turning back to the ocean over their balcony, watching the sunrise.

“It’s whatever. We have each other, we’ll be fine,” Lance says, trying for a smile, but Keith knows that expression, that tone of voice. Those words aren’t sincere; they’re only spoken for Keith’s benefit. Lance will always try to fake it until he makes it. That’s one thing that still hasn’t changed.

 

\--

 

“Then you put your index finger like this on the first fret…”

Lance’s hand covers Keith, guiding his fingers into the right position. Once satisfied, he pulls his hand back, letting Keith sit there and get a feel for the chord, and Keith can feel him smiling over his shoulder.

“There! Try strumming.”

Keith does. It’s awkward and a little uncomfortable and he feels like he’s elbowing Lance every time he strums, but the sound Lance’s guitar makes is sort of okay, and Lance tells him he’s doing it right.

“Yeah, like that! Then the second chord is a C, so you’re going to need to move your hand like this…”

Obediently, Keith lets Lance move his hand again without saying anything. He can’t see Lance’s face where he’s sitting behind Keith with his legs on either side of him, but he can feel breath on his neck and the warmth of Lance’s back so close to his. This wasn’t the main reason Keith had agreed to let Lance teach him guitar, but the proximity really isn’t a downside.

Keith didn’t learn any instruments when he was growing up. He didn’t have any interest in music at all, actually, and when asked what kind of music he liked he’d only shrug and mumble something about not really listening to it. Lance, though—Lance grew up soaking in it. It was a vital part of his life. He tells Keith stories about the songs his dad would hum as he got ready for work in the morning, the concerts his big sister took him too, the playlist his first girlfriend made him when he was thirteen—all the ways music influenced his life. All the little memories he has locked away that cultivated his love for it.

“My parents got me my first guitar when I was in sixth grade,” he’s said, laying on the floor of his and Keith’s apartment, watching the ceiling as he spoke. “They were gonna get me lessons too, but we couldn’t always make it there on time because everyone was so busy or I couldn’t get a ride, and the teacher was getting fed up with us canceling, so I just ended up teaching myself.”

Keith doesn’t know much about guitars, so he can’t say whether or not Lance’s playing is great or just something average—he has no frame of reference. But every time Lance plays, he seems happier, at peace, somehow, the way he is at the beach or falling asleep wrapped around Keith’s torso or messing around with Hunk and Pidge. That happiness seeps through as he’s playing, and even Keith can feel it through the chords he plucks and the quiet baritone of his singing.

Oh—he sings, too. When he isn’t doing some ridiculously overdone pop song or _All Star_ by Smash Mouth, Keith likes Lance’s singing voice.

He likes it a lot.

“Now strum,” Lance instructs. Keith does. It sounds okay this time, too, but every time Lance leans forward to watch Keith as he plays, it presses his chest further against Keith’s back, and Lance is so _warm_.

“Lance,” Keith says. He’s stopped strumming.

“Yeah? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

When he turns his head to the right, Lance’s face is there, so close to his, and Keith presses their lips together as best as he can like this. Lance makes a noise in surprise but kisses back, and even when it starts to strain Keith’s neck, he doesn’t pull away.

But eventually Lance does, and he mumbles _Keith_ before they’re switching positions. The guitar is moved gently to the side as Keith turns around and climbs into Lance’s lap, returning to kissing as soon as physically possible. Keith doesn’t know why he’s so desperate right now, doesn’t know what it was about having Lance’s hands like that and his chest to Keith’s back that made him want to jump his boyfriend so badly. But something had tugged on his chest when he felt breath against his neck, and he threads his fingers through Lance’s hair now.

Lance makes an appreciative noise in the back of his throat. They part briefly, just long enough for him to ask, a laugh in his voice, “I guess that means today’s lesson is over?”

Keith answers with another kiss.

It isn’t until much later that he thinks about the lesson again. He gets up a few hours later as Lance is sleeping in their bed and takes the guitar from its stand; hesitantly, he strums the two chords he’d learned, or at least what he remembers the chords as being. They don’t sound bad to him, so he thinks he got it right.

Behind him on the bed, Lance stirs. Keith hears the sheets being rearranged before he hears Lance’s proud, “You remembered! I seem to have a prodigy for a student.”

Keith plucks a string lightly and lets the note reverberate. “No, I just have a good teacher.”

 

\--

 

Days when it storms are the worst.

Keith doesn’t know why they’re so bad. He just knows that it’s always this primitive reaction—this horrible response drawn from him and Lance. Keith doesn’t do well during storms anyway, but ever since they returned home, it’s been worse. Hurricanes are the worst of them all, leaving both of them incapacitated for the day.

Even though Keith doesn’t do well, Lance is much worse off. There have been a total of four major, serious storms since they returned to Earth—Keith has been keeping count—and every time they started getting past a small thunderstorm, Lance ends up a panicked, anxious mess in their apartment’s living room.

It’s one of these days, but Keith has ways of dealing with it. When he’s by himself, he tries to sleep or do something that will keep him occupied and away from looking out the window or thinking about the storm outside, but for Lance, it’s harder to stay concentrated. Since their guitar lessons started, though, Keith has been using those as an excuse.

Outside, rain is coming down hard. There haven’t been any reports of hurricanes, and it’s supposed to stop raining by tonight, but that doesn’t reassure either of them. Instead, they try to calm themselves, and Keith leans back into the familiar weight of Lance behind him, guiding him, teaching him. Keith is learning a song that Lance grew up with—one his dad sang for him. All his siblings know it by heart.

“So it’s E minor, C, A minor, D, G, C,” Lance says, and Keith goes through the chord progressions quickly just to show that he knows what they are. “Good! Then, it goes—“

Thunder crackles outside, and both of them jump. Keith’s taken back to the castle being torn off course, the sound of something slipping and the pain of slamming his head into something hard—so much water—

And he’s back, here, now, in his apartment, on Earth, with a guitar in his hands and his boyfriend with him. Lance is scarily still behind him, and Keith leans back minutely to show him that he’s here, that they’re safe.

“…Sorry,” Lance mumbles. “Anyway, uh…so then it goes like that for the first verse…”

“Sing it for me?”

There’s a small pause. Keith waits, then he feels Lance take a breath, and his boyfriend’s voice is there at his ear, quiet and only for the two of them.

“ _Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,_ ” Lance sings. “ _Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens…_ Sing with me.”

“What?”

“C’mon, I don’t want to sing alone,” he insists. “And I like hearing your voice.”

“I’m not good.”

“It’s not about being _good_. It’s about…being _with_ me.”

Keith thinks there’s something underneath that, something deeper than just learning this song. And because it’s storming outside, and because he wants desperately for both of them to feel safe, to know that they’re there, he nods.

“ _Brown paper packages tied up with strings_ …”

Lance finishes with him, “ _These are a few of my favorite things_.” And although they’ve only finished the first verse, when Keith turns his head, Lance is absolutely beaming, like they’ve accomplished something great. Maybe to him they have.

 

\--

 

“What things remind you of me?”

Lance asks it one day as they’re making dinner. They were supposed to get together with Hunk and Pidge and Shiro to go out, but Hunk cancelled last minute because of something with his family, and Shiro had been on the fence about whether or not he could come in the first place, and then Pidge had decided to stay in for tonight. So now they’re back to their usual plans, heating up leftovers or ordering take out in their kitchenette as the TV plays in the background.

“What?”

“You know, like, when you see something or hear something and they remind you of me. What are they?”

Keith thinks about it as he heats up a container of leftover spaghetti in the microwave. The microwave counts down from two minutes to a minute and fifty seconds, and he shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess…the beach reminds me of you.”

“That makes sense,” Lance agrees. “Water and everything. I guess you’re reminded of me pretty often, then, huh?”

Keith knows that he’s referring to their choice of apartment—close enough to the beach to see the ocean, but not _on_ the beach. They were lucky to get an apartment at all.

When they’d first returned to Earth from saving the universe, Lance had wanted to stay with his family. And that made sense; Keith couldn’t blame him for that. But Keith had no one to return to, so the McClains were going to take him in until he could find a place on his own.

But the house wasn’t meant to fit two extra people. Lance’s family was big enough as it was, and it had only gotten bigger while they were galaxies away; now there was no space for Lance. Within a month, he was looking for somewhere the two of them could stay, some place just for them. To the McClains, it must seem odd that their son is living with someone he’s only been dating for less than a year, but they’ve been through so much, almost died for each other so many times…

The development of their relationship isn’t orthodox, Keith knows, but he really can’t be damned to care.

“What about me?”

“What reminds me of you?”

“Yeah. I answered for you.”

“A weak answer,” Lance says, and laughs when Keith rolls his eyes. “But sure. I guess…whenever I see red, I think of you.”

“And you said _my_ answer was weak?” Keith laughs.

“C’mon, it’s true! It’s super basic, but it’s true.” Even as Lance defends himself, he’s laughing. The microwave beeps, and Keith pulls out the container before dumping forkfuls of heated spaghetti onto two different plates.

“You must think of me a lot, then,” Keith muses, “since so many things are red.”

Arms snake around his torso in a backwards hug. Despite how many times Keith has insisted that Lance only does that because he’s seen it in movies so many times, he goes through the same motions every chance he gets; in the morning when they wake, that’s his greeting to Keith. Keith, for all his complaints, doesn’t really mind it.

“Sounds about right,” Lance says, before pressing a kiss to the nape of Keith’s neck and pulling away again. Not for the first time, Keith wishes he could stay there, the two of them tucked safely away together.

 

\--

 

But “safe” isn’t what either of them are used to.

Keith remembers hearing in school how soldiers come back from war and don’t remember how to live their lives without it, how some of them purposefully choose dangerous jobs—become police officers or fire fighters—because it’s the only way they know how to function any more. They don’t know safety, and they don’t know how to work without that adrenaline, without that danger.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him and Lance, he thinks. He wonders if the rest of the paladins think that way. If they struggle with everyday tasks, if they feel the call of adrenaline again sometimes, if they wake up some mornings antsy and trying to itch a scratch that they can’t touch any more. He doesn’t know. It’s been six months, and the paladins get together as often as they can to be with each other, but they don’t…talk about things like that. It’s not that they aren’t close any more or that they don’t trust each other with the knowledge—it’s that no one wants to breach the subject, wants to reopen a wound that Keith isn’t sure ever healed, isn’t sure is ever _going_ to heal.

It’s only with Lance that he talks about this, and even then he’s surprised with himself for having the courage to touch the topic. That’s proof that he’s grown, that he’s not the same person he was when he left Earth so many years ago—that he’s willing and wanting to talk about how he feels, that he’s okay with discussing things that make him uncomfortable and angry and upset and anxious, that he’s okay with admitting that anything at all makes him uncomfortable and angry and upset and anxious.

“I want to go back,” he confesses to Lance after another guitar lesson. They finished playing, but they’re still sitting like that, so close together, and Keith is still cradling the guitar to his body. He pulls it further towards him as if to comfort himself.

The worst part about Keith’s admission is that there is no place to go back _to_. They never stayed on one planet for too long, never lingered. They were always busy, too busy for stability. And it’s just that lack of stability that Keith wants to go back to.

“I get it,” Lance says.

“Do you ever feel guilty for wanting that?”

“Every day.”

He says it so casually, like they’re talking about nothing at all, but Keith knows what that means, knows what it feels like. The knowledge that he isn’t alone is something he cherishes, even though he’d rather Lance not experience that guilt at all.

His fingers curl around the second fret, and Keith absentmindedly strums different chords, not playing anything at all. But he can hear the memory of Lance singing, _when the dog bites, when the bee stings_ …

His chest feels so much heavier now.

Keith sighs, leans back into Lance’s warmth, lets his hand fall from the frets and come to hold the fretboard gently. He thinks about Lance as a teenager, learning to play on this guitar, then thinks about Lance now, twenty-one and so, so much older, so much different, playing the same songs.

_When I’m feeling sad…_

Keith mumbles, “I wish things were easier.”

“Things _are_ easier,” Lance says into his ear, softly. “That’s the whole problem.”

**Author's Note:**

> as always comments keep me goin 
> 
> come yell at me abt klance and season 2 on [tumblr](http://calliopin-around.tumblr.com)


End file.
